Royal IHC starts building dredger for stock

Royal IHC (IHC) is constructing the first vessel in its range of competitively priced standard trailing suction hopper dredgers (TSHD). It has started to build the Easydredge™ 2700 for stock in response to the increasing global demand for TSHDs with an extremely short delivery time. The new vessel will be supplied with a “world-dredging package”, which includes bottom doors, a bow coupling and a dredging depth of 25m. This makes her suitable for a wide range of tasks, from the maintenance of ports and channels, to land reclamation.

Fer Tummers, Managing Director of IHC’s Dredging Division, says: “Building a TSHD for stock is a logical step forward for IHC. We are convinced that this is also an excellent opportunity for our customers operating worldwide. Availability of dredging equipment often causes a bottleneck for new entrants to this market. The need to have equipment to secure a contract, and the need for a contract to secure financing to procure this equipment is a vicious circle that IHC aims to help break by having new equipment available from stock.

“In addition, we have experienced that standardisation, combined with extremely short delivery times, is a highly successful concept for our range of IHC Beaver® cutter suction dredgers. This enables us to achieve the combination of a high-quality product at a relatively low level of investment – and we are convinced that this also applies to the standard TSHD series.”

The construction of the Easydredge™ 2700 is being carried out by IHC partner MTG Dolphin’s shipyard in Varna, Bulgaria. It is responsible for the assembly process and will deliver the vessel in summer 2015.